« My work is represented painting, it is self-therapy made visible. With food and edible material. It acts as a psychosis determined by the mixture of human bodies, objects, materials. Everything is planned. Everything may be used as material and matter. Color not as colorant but as crayon, liquid, powder; egg not as egg but as vicious matter. Associations are used which link themselves to determinate materials either because of their form or for their meaning as normal use. Real facts are imitated and mixed with materials; real facts which can be mixed with artificial facts. In the same way, time and places can be exchanged. A symphony orchestra plays, naked, in a swimming pool which, little by little, is filled with jam, for example. The representation of a melodrama is sprayed with colors and covered with food: the singers have the job of carrying on to the very end.

Mixture, exchanges, and metamorphoses can be employed even during official ceremonies, parades, marches and other demonstration of the kind. Real events are imitated such as auto accidents, floods, fires and are mixed with various materials. Mixtures and combinations are carried out according to the dream method. In this way, events of a profound meaning result. Jam, dead bodies, road building equipment. Events will be formed, materials penetrate reality, common value no longer has sense, the jam becomes blood, everything becomes a symbol for some other event. The associativeness then has a large space within the possibilities which we have been given. If the audience cooperates, they become either actors or materials.

To impede interruptions during the action, the handling will be similar to that of a gym lesson.

(Manifesto of 1965, Vienna) (see Lea Vergine, p. 164-165)

- NITSCH Herman, Performance, 1965 (actionnisme).

« We are ever more attracted by our own existence. Every work of art is nothing but the mystique of the being. The aesthetic which pushes us until horror. The aesthetic of horror. This synesthetic attribute composed of

tactile sensations

taste sensations

olfactory sensations

acoustic recordings (sound colors)

and visual recordings (light colors)

exalts our orgastic senses. This growing activity of the whole sensorial apparatus can be compared to psychoanalytic analysis. Instead of associations, we find actions having the task of recording the sensorial activities up the to the final point of orgiastic reaction. (The sado-aggressive sensations, at an elementary level, which are obtained by tearing apart flesh, quartering the carcass of an animal and circling around the viscid mass of the intestines. The screams and noises of the action itself.) A long, exhausting crescendo of all the senses culminates in sadomasochistic excess. But it is just this excess, in its most complete representation, which provokes at the end, with an impressive lucidity, the real carthasis. This is the most dramatic moment of the action. A profound sense of repulsion pervades everywhere and at first charges the spectator negatively, but at the same time it acts subtly within the spectacle: the instincts are appeased, they sublimate themselves, they are dulled. The events which actually happen on the stage of this “theater of orgies and mysteries“ – contrary to the typical fiction used in the classic theater – are reflected in the soul of each spectator, favoring access in all its totality, of the lived existential mystique, this time, not individually but collectively.

Each gesture carries with it an enormous baggage of experience and a long series of profound meditations on existence itself. Instead of reacting, of denying, one accepts and visually sublimates every moment of the action, often helped by colored lights. Practically an aesthetic liturgy is born, which winds continually until the end.

FLESH

flesh

To dismember the flesh,

anal, sado-masochistically

(action of disenbowelment and of laceration)

to better inderstand the

amorphous zones of the being.

Color does not appear immediately

as such, but intensifies only

the sensuous zone.

COLOR (light)

color

The sublimating action of quartering

sections the light and the

colors of the flesh.

Flesh = light.

Rainbow.

Lightbow

seed of light, circle of colors,

circle of light.

Mathias Grünewald.

The sadomasochistic abreaction sublimates itself during the action until it fully comprehends all colors. » (see Lea Vergine, p. 176-177)

« In the place of pictures executed by hand, the premises for the insertion of the artistic nude in performances (actions with have as background the real world of objects manipulated by actors) is now making its appearance. The artist nude gets out of its traditional constriction and, similar to a wreckage, it finally liberates itself from the reproduction machinery used for information.

The artistic nude and spectacle by now have become a single thing. The objects and the elements of this Panorama move and transform themselves in the new space assigned (analysis of comparison, editing, automatic contacts, etc.). All is to allow the extension of the artistic nude to the total nude, which will place itself above the senses as an image, sometimes temporal, sometimes spatial, through the various possibilities of its repretive gestures and its repetitive presence. » (Panorama Manifesto I/The Total Nude, 1965) (see Lea Vergine, p. 233)